Take away coffee, tea, hot chocolate or other beverages, such as carbonated non-alcoholic drinks are regularly sold by street vendors or shops for a consumer to take the beverage away and consume it away from the point of sale. For example, on a given city block in the city of Sydney, Australia, it is typical to find coffee vendors in cafes or shops disposed usually on the ground floor of buildings, or dispensing carts or vans disposed on a street corner or adjacent an office building. Although cafes and some shops often provide a limited number of seats for consumers, it is customary for the consumers to purchase a coffee or other beverage from one of these vendors to be taken away and consumed elsewhere, for example, in an office or whilst in transit.
The vendors or coffee shops, for example, typically dispense a high number of take away beverages. Some vendors dispense sugar and other additives into the take away coffees whilst others leave it to the consumer. Typically, take away coffees are dispensed to consumers in paper or Styrofoam cup containers and lids are disposed over the top to prevent spillage and retain heat. Sometimes the lids include an aperture for drinking the coffee without removing the lid.
It is regularly known that some consumers will purchase take away coffees on behalf of one or more people often to save those other people the inconvenience of a trip to the coffee vendor. To assist a consumer in transporting two or more take away coffee containers whilst avoiding spillage, trays are often used. For example, such trays incorporate cup container holders having four apertures spaced apart in a plane. A most common form resembles a paper or fibreboard egg carton with only four apertures and the cups are simply received within the apertures and the cups can form an interference fit with a cup container to retain the cup in the holder. Such fibreboard egg carton-type holders can include a projection extending along the length of each aperture to more securely retain a cup. Unfortunately, as most coffee cups are not perfect cylinders but are tapered into a substantially cylindrical or frusto-conical form, it is not unusual for the consumer to angle the tray far enough to cause one or more cups to simply fall out in the course of normal carrying events, such as looking at traffic whilst walking, traversing stairs or driving a motor vehicle. In the latter case, it is normal to purchase take-away coffees, for example, from a drive-thru equipped retailer. As such, any container holders desirably firmly retain the cups against vehicle acceleration, deceleration and in cornering.
In another form of coffee cup holder, two spaced apart fibreboard sheets interconnected by flanges, or foldable side walls, are used. In such trays, the lower sheet is solid and the upper sheet contains four spaced apart apertures to each receive a cup. In use, the cup holder is unfolded by moving the upper apertured sheet of the holder away from the solid base sheet using the flanges or side walls as hinges. The cups are simply disposed in the apertures to sit on the base sheet. Unfortunately, small variations in the size of a coffee cup will cause the cup to not be retained circumferentially about the aperture so that the only retention mechanism is that the cup base is supported only on the base sheet of the holder. This disadvantageously results undesirable movement in transit or the cup to more easily fall out of the aperture.
In order to tackle this problem, foldable fingers or projections extending inwardly from the aperture were employed. These fingers or projections are configured to extend radially inwardly so as to reduce the initial diameter of the aperture and hence increase the range of cup sizes that can be received therethrough. As the cup size increases from the initial size of the aperture defined by the ends of the fingers or projections, insertion of the cup causes the fingers to hingedly move and to bend downwardly and outwardly in a hinging manner so as to increase the aperture size to correspond to the size of the coffee cup and maintain a weak interference type fit.
Unfortunately, as the fingers are bent downwardly, it is found that they can be moved in response to a tilting tray and the additional biasing force supplied by a cup on some fingers on one side of the aperture whilst the tray is under tilt reduces the strength of the holding ability of these fingers. Furthermore, once the fingers or projections have been moved to accommodate a disposable coffee cup, the fingers lose some of their resilience to return to be substantially planar with the top of the holder, which further reduces their strength in holding cups.
Whilst such tray like holders are used in such city locations, they are also known to be used at sporting events, for example. When a consumer at a sporting stadium purchases two or more beverages, which are often dispensed in paper or plastic cups with tapered sidewalls, holders as above are used to assist the consumer make their way to their seats without spillage. Environments such as sporting events or where crowds are gathered, can make it difficult to carry two or more coffees or cold beverages when, for example, stairs need to be negotiated or accidental bumping can occur. In these environments, the above trays do not always perform their functions of retaining disposable cups securely for transit from a vendor to a remote location for consumption.